Some observations on the peasant flights and çiftlikization in the early eighteenth-century Florina
MEHMET ALİ ÇELİK
This article aims to make some observations on peasant flights, population movements, and çiftlikization in Ottoman Macedonia based on a detailed avarız register of Florina (1710), and to make a limited contribution to the early modern çiftlik literature. This register presents a picture of Florina’s rural economy, which was contracting due to a demographic crisis, and being çiftlikized as it downsized. The register emerged as a result of recent peasant flights, internal migration, and population changes that lasted for nearly 20 years in the region. Certain individuals from the notables and military classes converted the deserted lands by peasants into their çiftliks. These changes in the countryside caused social conflicts among çiftlik-owners and peasants over taxation and land. The result, as reflected in the survey of 1710, was a different rural order that emerged out of the collective actions of a changing military class, notables, and dispossessed and displaced peasants.
Keywords: demographic change, peasant flights, çiftlikization
A corruption case in rural Thessaloniki: Mucîbe Hanım’s çiftliks and local notables
BEDİRHAN LAÇİN
This study analyzes the political and economic processes underpinning the accumulation of Mucibe Hanım’s wealth, who passed away in the late eighteenth century in the countryside of Salonica, leaving behind a fortune of remarkable scale for her time. It explores, on a micro level, the rolee of conflicts between her husband’s once-powerful dynasty and rival families in shaping this fortune,the ways in which the inventory and subsequent disposition of her çiftliks constituted successive acts on the stage of elite competition, and how her çiftliks occupied a center place in these intra-elite struggles. By focusing on region-specific details, aims not only to shed light on a singular case but also points to similar dynamics observable across different parts of the empire. The distinctive feature here, however, is that Mucibe Hanım occupies the central place in this narrative not during her lifetime, but only after her death.
Keywords: corruption, bribe, elite, landed-estate, probate inventory
Land ownership, çiftliks, and labor relations in the district of İştip in the 19th century in the light of the income survey registers (Temettuat Defterleri)
EZGİ BURCU IŞIL-SEVGENER
This study examines the agricultural structure and property relations in the mid-19th century Ottoman Balkans, focusing on the İştip district. It analyzes çiftliks engaged in agricultural production under private ownership and diverse labor arrangements, highlighting the structural separation between landownership and production. Moving beyond individual çiftliks, it considers the broader agrarian framework composed of both çiftliks and surrounding villages, thereby extending the analysis to the district level. Drawing on temettuat registers and supplementary archival sources, the study reconstructs patterns of çiftlik ownership, labor relations, and the socio-economic composition of agricultural producers, shedding light on the economic and social dynamics of Ottoman rural society.
Keywords: çiftlik, income survey registers, labour, İştip, Nazırzade
Archival topography and analytical layers of the Ottoman çiftlik
FATMA ÖNCEL
This study examines çiftliks from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century by analyzing changes in their legal status and property practices not only through their content, but also in relation to archival and bureaucratic restructuring processes. The provenance-based organization of the Ottoman archive necessitates two methodological approaches: the synchronic method, which investigates different institutional and thematic layers comparatively within a specific historical moment; and the diachronic method, which follows the reclassification of archival fonds and the transformation of administrative institutions over time, thereby situating the evolution of çiftliks within broader macro-political and micro-economic contexts. Through this integrated approach, çiftliks are conceptualized within a long-term, political-economic framework at the intersection of legal, social, and economic processes. The study defines the çiftlik as a four-layered historical phenomenon: (1) a tax unit through which fiscal obligations were organized, (2) a site of power competition between central and local elites, (3) a field of diverse labor relations involving peasant households, day laborers, and nomadic communities, and (4) a form of agricultural enterprise subject to administrative oversight and traceable through documentary production. This framework combines archival- based, synchronic, and diachronic methodologies. The geographical focus of the research is Thessaly and the neighboring region of Epirus. The coexistence of diverse property regimes, the area’s strategic place within the imperial economy, and its sharp physical and demographic contrasts make it a highly representative case for studying Ottoman çiftliks.
Keywords: çiftlik, property, archival topography, synchronic method, diachronic method
In pursuit of an “unfounded concern”: The development of large-scale land ownership in Western Anatolia from emvâl-i metrûke to land reform (1914-1945)
MUSTAFA YAŞAR ÖZOYLUMLU
This study examines the transformation of land ownership in Western Anatolia between 1914 and 1945 by analyzing the processes through which Greek-owned estates were transferred to the advantage of the Muslim-Turkish population,
as well as the historical context and political implications of the ensuing concentration of property. During the period that began with the 1914 Greek Exodus, continued with the 1923 Turkish-Greek Population Exchange, and was subsequently shaped by the liquidation of emvâl-i metrûke, the concentration of land not in the hands of the incoming exchangees but under the control of the local notable classes constituted not only a defining dynamic of rural class relations but also rendered landownership a central domain of political economy in the post-1923 era. Drawing on archival documents, statistical data, and official reports, the study reassesses the vulnerability of small peasant holdings within their historical context while discussing the role of large-scale landownership in the failure of land reform initiatives during the early Republican period.
Keywords: Western Anatolia, abandoned properties, Land Reform, large estates, population exchange
Obtaining permission from the neighborhood for marriage: The transformation of religious marriage in Istanbul in the first half of the 18th century
MADOKA MORİTA
In the early eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire stepped up efforts to bring the gender relations and sexual morality in Istanbul under stricter control, justifying such efforts by asserting that illicit conjugality among the inhabitants was ubiquitous. Reflecting this concern, a grand vizier’s order of 1710 not only prohibited matrimony without court permission (izinname), but also made it mandatory for brides-to-be to procure testimony on their matrimonial eligibility from their neighborhoods, testimony which was a prerequisite for marriage permission. For, contrary to the conventional knowledge among scholars, the court’s issuance of marriage permission did not entail its verification of the matrimonial eligibility of the marrying spouses-in essence, the court created another procedural step for persons hoping to get married. Under the new regulation, court permission should be issued to those who supervise marriages –mostly the imams– only after the recording of testimonies on the marital status of intended brides in court registers. In the wake of this regulation, the court started registering such testimonies preceding to marriage permission, amounting to over 5,000 entries that survive to this day. Based on my examination of these and other hitherto unknown yet numerous primary documents, this paper shows that the addition of a small bureaucratic process in marriage foregrounds a competing urban space where some imams sought to expand their spheres of influence by interfering with other imams in the performance of marriages. Thereby I argue that this bureaucratic process played a significant role in creating a tighter linkage between the fact of residency in a neighborhood, the imam’s supervision of marriage, and the collective accountability for marital status of individuals, particularly of women. To be precise, a neighborhood –that is, a collective primarily based on the imam-congregation relationship– became firmly anchored in a physically defined space in the city. The eighteenth century experiment discussed in this paper appears to have been a precursor to the procedure that was to be adopted over a century later, when, in the late nineteenth century the court began to issue marriage permission upon receipt of an official note of information (ʻilmühaber) from each neighborhood that confirmed the lack of impediment to marriage.
Keywords: Marriage permission, marriage contract, testimony, sharia court registers neighborhood, imami, non-Muslim, Istanbul
The Enver Pasha cult in the Ottoman Empire during the Second Constitutional era and his portraits
FUNDA BERKSOY
The aim of this article is to explore the construction of a “leadership cult” around Enver Bey (1881-1922; Enver Pasha from 1914 onwards), one of the prominent members of the Committee of Union and Progress, during the Second Constitutional Era (1908-1918) in the Ottoman Empire, as an example of “modern personality cults” and elaborate its visualization through paintings, sculpture and portrait medals. “Modern personality cults”, according to historian Jan Plamper, emerge in patriarchal and “closed/authoritarian societies” that have electoral political systems functioning via mass politics and have gone through secularization processes. They are constructed by means of attributing divine-like qualities to a political leader and glorifying him through mass communication means. While these modern personality cults have emerged in Europe from the mid-19th century onwards, one can observe the appearance of a comparable one within the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century during the Second Constitutional Era. Indeed, the period between 1908 and 1918 in the Ottoman Empire was marked by the expansion of the web of capitalist relations, constitution of a parliamentary system, upholding of the secularization process, occurrence of policy transfers from the German Empire, and crystallization of some proto-fascistic elements that had already become evident in those years in Europe. It is argued in the article that it was also the period in which a “modern personality cult” was constructed around Enver Pasha, one of the most important political figures in the domestic sphere at the time, in the sense defined by Plamper by way of propaganda carried out by local and foreign newspapers, the Committee of Union and Progress, the German state and Enver Pasha himself. Along with some mass communication means such as post-cards, photographs etc., the cult arguably became visible on the paintings prepared by artists such as Osman Hamdi, Fausto Zonaro, Arthur Fischer and Viktor Krausz, a sculpture created by Eugen Boermel, the Commemorative Medal of the Victory at the Dardanelles and many other commemorative medals produced in the German Empire and Austria that also reveal the close relations established between these countries and the Ottoman Empire. It was constructed by discursive components centering on “heroism”, “altruism”, “sacredness”, attributing him certain qualities such as “being the sole decision-maker/being determined/ being an action-taker” that would later become the key elements
of the Führerprinzip of the Nazi ideology and eventually ascribing him the quality of being a “war hero.”
Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Enver Pasha, modern personality cult, proto-fascism, portraits
